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If all goes well, every Fleming will have had the chance to be vaccinated against the corona virus by 11 July. But then comes the second dilemma: will we have to vaccinate again later? Pierre Van Damme answers that question.
Yesterday, Flemish Minister of Public Health Wouter Beke (CD&V) told in ‘De seventh day’ that – if the vaccines are delivered on time – “every 18-year-old and older will have been injected at least once”. That’s good news, but a lot of people wonder how long the corona vaccine is effective.
No guarantee
According to Vaccinologist Pierre Van Damme (University of Antwerp), that is currently still coffee grounds. “As with any vaccine on the market, you never know in advance how long it will work. In jaundice (hepatitis B), for example, it was initially said that you should get a booster vaccination every five years. With advancing insight, this became every ten years, and eventually it was even said that a booster vaccine is not necessary. This will be the same with the corona vaccine. So a vaccine comes onto the market and is now being monitored further. Then we will see if that works for a year, two or three years, but we cannot guarantee now that it will indeed work for that long, ”he explained in ‘The seventh day’.
Small risk
Presenter Lieven Verstraete noted that “for people who have doubts, this is not really a reassuring answer”. “No, but that applies to all vaccines. What is the alternative? Not marketing the vaccine and monitoring the people who are now in all those large studies for two, three years at a time. But that does mean that we have to stick to the measures for two or three years. So we weigh that up. On the one hand, we have a vaccine that works, which we have to trust in terms of safety, because it has been thoroughly researched. Either we believe it and use it, because it works. But then we take a small risk, because we don’t know how long it will work yet. And perhaps we will indeed have to provide a booster vaccination ”, says Van Damme.
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